The Universe is so unimaginably big, and it's positively teeming with an almost infinite supply of potentially life-giving worlds. So where the heck is everybody? At its heart, this is what's called the Fermi Paradox: the perplexing scientific anomaly that despite there being billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy — let alone outside it — we've never encountered any signs of an advanced alien civilization, and why not?

Astronomers have discovered three peculiar runaway stars that have apparently survived cataclysmic explosions at their cores.
A white dwarf is an ageing star that has burned through its original fuel. Under certain conditions, a white dwarf’s burnt-out core re-ignites; the core’s subsequent explosion is known as a supernova. Some stars are thought to survive these explosions to become so-called zombie stars.

Astronomers have found the ghostly remains of one of the Universe’s first stars inside a rare, ancient star far, far away on the other side of our galaxy. ANU astronomer Dr Thomas Nordlander said the parent of the star they discovered 35,000 light years away in the Milky Way was about 10 times the mass of our Sun and, as a result, probably didn’t live very long.

Stars and black holes can form from rotating matter. Yet exactly how they form has long remained one of the big questions of astrophysics. Now, scientists have discovered magnetic fields can cause turbulences within "dead zones," helping them understand just how compact objects form in the cosmos.

Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe, and display a mysterious diversity in their appearance that have puzzled astronomers for more than two decades. Now, scientists think they have a method for solving that mystery.

The "magic island" mystery on Saturn's moon Titan just became more puzzling.
Last year, astronomers spotted a strange bright feature in Titan's Ligeia Mare sea that they called a "magic island." The object first appeared in pho...

The strength of an alien world's magnetic field may have been deduced for the first time, by analyzing fast winds slamming against it from the planet's star. The research could help gauge the strength of other exoplanets' magnetic fields as well.